Blog

Do Ventilators Help or Harm the Coronavirus Patients?

16 Apr 2020 | Anju S

Need for more mechanical ventilators has hit the world a storm. Many organisations, engineers and medical equipment manufacturers have started to pull all-nighters to make their skills useful in this way until a more effective and preventive treatment for the Coronavirus disease is developed. Also known as the ‘respirator’, some health experts consider ventilators can decide the life or death for serious COVID-19 patients. Conspiracies are doing rounds about if ventilator can cause more harm than good for the COVID-19 affected. Several researches are going on to find out the truth. Amidst all of this, engineers are trying to develop low-cost ventilators to do whatever they possibly can.

HealthDay Reporter has apprehensions that, ventilators may damage a patients’ health over time, as high-pressure oxygen is forced into the minuscule air sacs in a patient’s lungs. Several hospitals have reported strangely high death rates for patients who were on ventilators.

Dr Udit Chaddha, an interventional pulmonologist think that earlier tendencies were to put patients on ventilators early on or as soon as their condition started to deteriorate. Medical practitioners have stopped doing that or as he said, “That is something that most of us have stepped away from doing.” However, he also thinks that at time ventilator is the only option. It is in a case where a patient is in a serious respiratory distress.

Sphinx Worldbiz and TimeTooth Technologies has sworn in to make affordable, quickly manufactured mechanical ventilators because the world may face that crisis soon and we should be prepared. The main function of a mechanical ventilator is to supply oxygen into a patient’s failing lungs. Utilising the machine involves numbing a patient while placing a tube into his throat. Deaths in such critical patients tend to get a probability regardless of the reason why they need breathing assistance.

According to health experts, over 40 to 50% of patients suffering from severe respiratory issues die while on ventilators. The reason is still obscure. Perhaps, the reason behind the higher death rate of COVID-19 infected people can be the kind of illness they had before getting infected by the COVID-19 virus. Or it could be connected to how sick they were by the time they were put on the ventilator.

According to Dr. Hassan Khouli, chair of critical care medicine at Cleveland Clinic, these crucially sick patients die because they are already in a critical situation that they essentially need a ventilator to stay alive, not because the ventilator gravely harms them.

As there is no evidence of anti-coronavirus medicine, for now, ventilators seem to be the only way to rescue the patients from an early failure to the COVID-19 attack. Engineering companies around the world are helping the healthcare sector to boost the supply of medical equipment. Sphinx Worlbiz and TimeTooth are doing their bit. A fundraiser for the development of an open source design of a low-cost ventilator is being run by them. If you feel like contributing, check out the links to make donations here.